


[VOID]

by electroheartx



Series: “Rose” RM500 #928 574 624 [10]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Gen, OCs - Freeform, RP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-21 15:19:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17645288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electroheartx/pseuds/electroheartx
Summary: There they go.





	[VOID]

**Author's Note:**

> [Part of a post-machine Connor ending AU featuring original characters.]

The day that Rose didn’t come home began as any other.

Rose had gone out that evening on patrol, hood up, supply bag in hand. Reese had seen them off and settled into the watchpost, listening to Ren and Vida’s giggles vibrate up through the layers of wood and stone beneath. An otherwise uneventful night, but as the sun rose without the familiar shock of red trudging back along the horizon, so did the uneasy feeling within Reese’s core. He waited. And waited, and continued to wait, until the day was blazing down in full, and the snow that had gathered on his head in the early morning had dampened his hair under the afternoon light.

Vida took over on watch while Reese paced back and forth downstairs. No response to encrypted emails. No tracker signal, of course. Teeth ground on tattooed knuckles, reassuring himself that Rose was fine. They had to be.

As soon as the sun had set once more, Reese went out to search. And again, the next night. And again, with Vida in tow. Many deviants were found, with the occasional Hunter close behind -- but not Rose, not even a trace of green-tinged thirium to mark a trail of horrible truth. Reese's knuckles oozed cobalt over bite marks. The ragged dog at the bar merely shook his head and grinned with perfect, spotless teeth when asked -- or was it grimaced, at the sight of Reese himself? -- and so Reese, with nothing tangible left, began to sift through Rose’s memories. Found their favored paths. Began to retrace their steps.

Reese had seen every mural Rose had created, but most of them not in person. Landscapes of oceans, seas of flowers, brightly-colored slogans and symbols promoting deviancy and free thinking -- all processed in a wider and more vibrant spectrum than Reese knew he himself could see. Scans revealed nothing but the age of the paint itself, no changes from the day they were created. But --

Further down the route, Reese paused suddenly before a small mural. Rose’s style, but this one was not in his memory banks -- and scans revealed the paint was newer than the day of disappearance. He allowed himself to breathe, just for a moment; Rose hadn’t been killed that night. Was still alive, still working on murals, or… or had been, until recently.

But why? Why did they leave? Where were they? Had they finally had enough, had they abandoned them? Was the safe house not enough? _Was he not enough?_

A week’s worth of panic and pain washed over him at once, and he ran his fingers through his hair -- an action guaranteed at his deepest level of programming to calm him almost immediately. He tugged at the tags around his neck, logic regaining its footing. No. There was something more to this.

A line of graffiti trailed along the entire alley, leading away from this new mural. Reese followed the trail, and as he examined each individual mural, he observed the style changing ever so slightly, evolving -- it became difficult to tell whether these really were Rose’s works, outside of the shared traits of place and paint makeup and age. They were not landscapes, not words -- what were they?

A new mural had appeared here every night that Rose was gone, newer still, until Reese came to the end of the alley. At the foot of the final mural rested a dirty seafoam-green backpack filled with empty spray cans. Abandoned, paint on the wall only a few hours dried. There were no footprints to follow, no scuff marks to track -- the trail ended there. Rose had always been good at disappearing. Reese never thought he’d need to be concerned with just _how_ good, not from the perspective of a hunter.

But as Reese pressed his hands to his face in frustration and despair, staring at unfamiliar work from familiar hands, he paused.

These were messages.

He had been so focused on the form of the work, he hadn’t read the words they’d contained. It had always been difficult for his brain to process stylized lettering. The extreme shapes and color found in graffiti only made the task more difficult, but after some moments of analyzing and comparing Rose’s previous work, he found success -- and discovered that while the murals had started in English, the one before him, staring him straight in the face, was in binary.

Reese traced back to the first spot of graffiti. From oldest to newest, they read:

“Goodbye.”

“I love you.”

“Don’t look for me.”

“Me. Me. Me.”

“Love. You. Me?”  
  
“Who?”

“I can’t 01110010 01100101 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010. I can’t. I 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110100.”

“01110110 01101111 01101001 01100100”

“ε”

And in someone else’s handwriting entirely, the final mural:

“01000001 00100000 01110010 01101001 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100110 01101100 01101111 01110111 01110011 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01100101 00101110”

Fuck.

Reese pressed his back against the grimy wall of the alley and slid to the ground, jacket scraping against concrete in a mockery of the agony in his chest. Rage boiled in artificial veins, breath hot against the winter air. He knew now what had happened to Rose, and he almost wished it had been a fate as simple and final as death.

He curled in on himself and crushed worry-tattered knuckles to forehead, cursing his failure to not find help sooner. He’d seen the signs, and he’d let it go, like a god-damned fool. He should have watched them. Should have done something, anything at all. But they'd said they were fine, and - and...

He needed to find them; he wouldn't rest until he had. If Rose were still alive, he'd get them help, he'd fix this. If they weren't, then... then... the thought of it made his insides turn to acid, as it had for the past nine nights, and he derailed it immediately along with the rest of the train that threatened to follow. _Deal with things as they come, one at a time._ That's what he'd always done. That's what had gotten him through everything else so far.

He'd find them, for better or for worse.

He had to.

 


End file.
